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Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#271

Post by abledon »

id wrote: post #96
abledon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need to see a therapist about feeling guilty about overworking. You only need to work as much as whats required, nothing more. If you can close off your assigned 'tickets' etc, given each sprint, do so, then rest. Your personal well-being is #1.

It's kinda weird watching team members finish two tickets per week when you know they could finish two per day . I know I should probably relax like them but it feels too much like cheating (and let's be honest, it is).

i agree its gross, but its the reality we live in. Assuming you're being payed the same salary range as someone who is 1/5 as effective as you, why should you work harder than them? you're not compensated for your extra energy put in (unless its your own startup etc, or you have a large equity %) so theres no reason to do more than you're asked. beautiful thing about a salary job is you clock in, do whats asked of you, then do your own stuff on the side.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#272

Post by 0xabe »

It sounds like you’re good at what you do, and that it comes relatively easily. Be thankful for that. Many people don’t have that. It sounds like your performance has made you a bit of a superstar. Be thankful for that. Many people work in obscurity. Don’t let it make you feel lonely. Quite the opposite, it sounds like you’re popular. Use your “status” to create the network you want. Stay humble and remind yourself to be happy. You’re in a good place.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#273

Post by cjaybo »

megous wrote: post #248
cableshaft wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur, switch jobs. It may just be that you've become the big fish in a small pond (or even a large pond, but just at that company). No better way to make you realize what all you don't know except by switching jobs. I've been "the goto guy" at a few places, usually just ended up that way over time, and when I switched jobs, suddenly it felt like I didn't know anything, or at least had a lot of catching up to do.…

Will the "getting busy/challenged learning new things at new job" resolve the loneliness feeling though?

Considering that the loneliness seems to be a byproduct of feeling like the smartest person in the room, I think it could be a good perspective shift. There are always smarter people and harder problems.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#274

Post by sam0x17 »

One thing to watch out for -- all the problems you list can also be symptoms of you simply being the only one who understands most of the code. This could be because you are the only truly competent dev, but it could just as easily be because there is something about your code that makes it difficult for others to navigate and/or modify. Probably not the issue, but always something to watch out for.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#275

Post by michael1999 »

Learning to teach what you know will help more than working more hours. Don’t try to force teaching on the uninterested. Invest in the curious. Surely some of your team would like to be more like you. Have you asked?

And find a physical hobby you enjoy. Weights, zoomba, climbing, whatever. Even better if it’s something you can share with your wife or one of the kids.

Movement and teaching will do wonders for your state.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#277

Post by rapind »

100011_100001 wrote: post #40
ctvo wrote: post #16

I think you're an above average developer working at a below average company. This could be the root of all your problems. Nothing is more frustrating than working with peers you know aren't carrying their weight. Do you want to be an engineering leader? This is what you are, regardless of your official title at your company. Engineering leaders are judged by how much better they make everyone else. You may hear the…

The pivot I have been debating is to become a Lead Development Manager with the express purpose of enabling everyone else, removing obstacles, creating better processes etc. My problem is that I love code much more than talking to people all day. I have been mentoring Jr Devs for a while now in an official capacity which helps. I like the idea of "make systemic changes to help your peers become more effective". So th…

For a non “Valley” perspective, your work situation sounds fine TBH. You are already the defacto dev lead (making it official could mean meetings).

Hobbies, sports, instruments, hell even a book club. Get social outside of work. Treat it the same as you’ve been treating your career (dig in and get good). You’ll find you make friends outside of work, but often at work too, as you may have hobbies in common with others at your job.

This will naturally lead to a good work balance, because you may end up wanting to clock out early to get back to your hobby. You’re in a great negotiating position to reduce your hours when that happens.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#278

Post by cleandreams »

If you are with a really good company (I know people at microsoft who had this) you can get a very senior person to meet with you regularly as a mentor. YOU need a mentor. You are giving a lot. I think it's possible you need to work for a better company or at a division that is better in your current company.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#279

Post by jiggawatts »

100011_100001 wrote: post #33
ziddoap wrote: post #21

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” I know saying this is easier than doing it, but; seek upward movement until you no longer feel like you're the smartest person in the room. I would also add, although it's purely personal opinion, that seeking a solution to loneliness through work is a surefire way to feel more lonely. You say you're big on self-improvement, but are you only focus…

I've thought about this. I actually do not think I'm the smartest person in the room, hell two of the people in my direct team are definitely smarter than me. I think I have really good systems that allow me to consistently solve problems and write code. On the loneliness front, I meant in the scope of working. I have four kids, I am everything BUT lonely with them. However, I do agree that aside from work and one of…

> I actually do not think I'm the smartest person in the room, hell two of the people in my direct team are definitely smarter than me. I think I have really good systems that allow me to consistently solve problems and write code.

I had the exact same experience in my first job, where I was one of the least experienced developers and I wasn't even remotely the smartest one there.

However, I was working smarter than everyone else. For example, I was the only one that had adopted a "proper" IDE (IntelliJ IDEA). I was the only one using the source control the way it was supposed to be used. I was the only one using scripts to automate the gruntwork. Etc...

I could be told about a bug and the function name it was in and be done fixing it in under a minute. Literally just the "global semantic search" feature of the the IDE saved me hours of time compared to everyone else. Incremental builds saved me another hour. Automated tests running in the background eliminated an hour of manual testing.

Hilariously, the reason I leaned on the tools so heavily was that I felt like I wasn't good enough to navigate the codebase without the assistance of an IDE.

The end result was that I could run circles around everyone else. Like you, I compared the checkins per week and I was #1 by far. Literally more fixes per unit time than everyone else combined.

This should be a lesson for everyone here who thinks that they are smart, or experienced, or "senior":

- Your typing speed is not your velocity. It doesn't matter how good you are with VI or Emacs if you take hours to complete a task that a purpose-built IDE lets a junior developer finish in a minute.

- Tooling outside of the editor matters. Incremental builds matter. Automated tests matter. Telemetry from production matters.

- Focusing on features while there are open bugs is a guaranteed catastrophe. You will have to fix the bugs sooner or later anyway. You can fix them right now, or you'll have to compensate for them while adding features... and then fix them later, after having wasted your own time.

Etc...

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#280

Post by lumost »

leaflets2 wrote: post #219
omarhaneef wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to just code, just code. I accept you're a gifted coder, and that you're better than your peers. Good, then do exactly that. Being good at mentoring people is only vaguely correlated with being good at code. IMHO, the main factor that will make you good at something is caring about it, and if you don't want to talk to people you'll waste your skills. There is someone out there who would love to talk to pe…

> There is someone out there who would love to ... Let them do it It seems to me, though, that OP vastly much better at that, than the others available. And that his co-workers have noticed this too.

sounds like a good time to work on a harder problem :) OP is crushing it on their product. Given the OPs description, we can also infer that the OP works somewhere that commits correlate with output well.

A few interesting questions that come to mind.

1 - Does OP feel like they are doing the same things over and over again?

2 - Does OP want to work with better/more skilled engineers?

3 - Is OP setting the technical direction? Do they want to?

Being the top coder by commits in a group of 350 is a super power, however many "Hard" software problems are resistant to code throughput as a fix. There are extremely difficult software problems that take years to produce the ~1k line solution.

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